As far as I'm concerned, the whole "raison d'etre" of a Start Menu is that it pops up quickly, gives you a logical list of shortcuts to your applications, lets you click the one you want and then buggers off quickly until you need it again.

The "strange" concept of having animated tiles inside the Start Menu implies that it needs to stay open so you can watch those tiles updating for whatever reason. That in turn makes the desktop look schizophrenic with half-Metro and half-Classic interface.

As a result, it still looks entirely to me like it's just about Microsoft being a spoilt brat about Metro and not accepting that it has no place on a desktop computer, so it has to keep letting Metro make an appearance in some fashion.

The last good Windows interface was XP in Classic mode, everything else since has been ugly and badly thought out with huge wastages of screen real estate. And come July 29th, I shall be upgrading my last Windows 7 PC to Gentoo Linux - I'm done with being a Microsoft "used and abused" user.

Your points are valid from your perspective, I cannot argue with them.

But from my perspective as a music lover and music consumer, I am extremely happy with the amount of good and interesting music that's out there for me to go and explore, and I am happy with the price it is offered to me at.

If anything, having no interest in the manufactured and mainstream crap means I have to search a bit harder to find what I want, that makes it all the more satisfying when I do find it.

To be honest, if they stopped making CDs tomorrow, I'd still have years and years of rooting through what CDs would be left out there anyway, I don't think digital downloads will ever be an issue for me.

No, I can't say anything to change it. The record companies know I'm here, I'm a middle-aged man with some disposable income, probably with his head rooted in the music of his youth, so they release lots of classic remasters for me to go and buy. End result is I am happy as a pig in shit.

But I'm probably not their target demographic, I'm too old and probably too fussy in my tastes. Therefore I'm not going to cover my monitor in spittle ranting about the wrongs of digital downloads - because ultimately they don't affect me and I can still do things my way.

But I do object to these sweeping statements that the music industry is somehow bad or evil in what it does. Like I said, for me it's doing a great job.

Actually, I make a point of having a lot of good and useful contact with kids. I have great nephews and nieces, plus I have over three decades experience in telecoms and IT and a total passion for passing my knowledge on to kids - to the point where I even volunteer my time teaching kids to program Python on Raspberry Pi at after school clubs.

Please do not believe that you can "know" someone based on a couple of paragraphs they typed onto a public forum. It could be, for example, that I or my partner are incapable of having kids, wherein your response would be extremely hurtful.

In actuality, I like my own time and my freedom and, yes, I am probably too selfish a person to give up the amount of time I think my kids would need. But that does NOT mean I don't care for kids in general because it was the fact that many adults took an interest in me when I was growing up that made me the balanced, giving and decent person I am today.

Other than that, kindly bugger off with your trolling, as I owe you personally no explanation.

At this moment in time, I don't see myself ever paying for a digital music download, call me old fashioned but I need something tangible when it comes to music. (Though I do admit to downloading and paying for games through Steam and Good Old Games.)

To me, the CD represents excellent value for money, especially if I am paying around £10 UK for a piece of music I may well end up repeatedly enjoying over the next few decades.

Plus I never buy a bad CD but ALWAYS buy a good CD. I use Usenet and BitTorrent to get a "dodgy" copy of any new CD I am interested in, I give it a listen to and if I like it then I buy it straight away, usually on Amazon. If the download is crap, I delete it because it's not even worth the disk space.

Sorry, I probably do miss out on a lot of younger talented musicians who only release digital music but my excuse is I am in my fifties and my musical passions are mainly hard rock, prog rock, krautrock and blues from the late 60s through to the early 80s. From that perspective, the record companies are currently doing a superb job rereleasing and remastering both popular and extremely obscure artists from the genres and periods that I enjoy.

And because I get to hear every CD before I buy it, I never buy a bad one. That makes me an extremely happy and valued music consumer who is entirely content with the job the record companies are doing, I will never be able to find the time to get round to listening to anywhere near all of what they are releasing currently.

My CD collection amounts to over 2,500 of them to date, the added bonus of them is that I rip them once to put on my music server then they serve as their own backups sitting on a shelf - with nice sleeve notes to read whilst on the toilet because I am that passionate about my music.

There are extremely talented modern artists out there, but the vast majority of modern music I hear does not have the longevity or quality that I like in music, I am therefore not surprised that it's designed to be disposable, such that when you are bored with it after a few months, you just delete if from your hard disk.

Incidentally, I am probably also a total music snob in that I don't treat music like "Pick n Mix" sweeties at the cinema - I don't believe in picking just the tracks I want from an artist, any artist who cannot engage me for the entire length of an album is not one I would care to listen to anyway. I therefore listen to full albums, not single tracks or compilations.

Likewise, my music is a passion for me, that means that a lot of the time I just sit there and listen to it on some good hi-fi, I don't always have it in background whilst I am doing something else. Someone who just listens to music that way is not a true music fan anyway.

It's important to not make sweeping statements. Music means entirely different things to different people, to me it is extremely important bearing in mind I also go and see many artists play live too.

I started gaming again over the cold Winter months, I have a Windows 7 desktop with Steam that is there for gaming, specifically RPG FPS games like Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas. (Neither have native Linux versions for those who don't know.)

I recently upgraded the Windows desktop from an old ATI/AMD graphics card to a newer NVIDIA card due to wanting better Fallout performance. All my other desktops run Gentoo Linux and ATI/AMD cards, probably 66xx or 67xx chipsets.

The only thing stopping me ditching Windows completely is the fact that I have twice as many games in Windows Steam as opposed to Linux Steam, other than that I don't need Windows at all.

But if anyone can confirm if Windows Steam in WINE works well with NVIDIA cards then I may do an upgrade or two so I can ditch Windows completely. I tried it with ATI/AMD cards and had very little success, especially when it came to game performance. But I also have done very little in recent years on NVIDIA cards and WINE gaming.... so any hints here gratefully received!

I am not a parent myself but the majority of kids of friends and family around me are good kids that I think and hope will grow up to be well-balanced individuals.

The common factors amongst all of them are moderation, and exposure to adults other than their parents who take a genuine interest in them, as well as parents who make time for them. When socialising with other adults who talk to them and listen to them, they feel valued and get self-respect and self-worth.

The problem with bad kids are the parents, period. We've bred a greedy have-it-now society in the rich Western World that means adults living in credit card debt, both having to work to keep two or more cars on the drive just to "keep up with the Jones' next door", and those same selfish people decide to bring kids into the world without having the proper time to give them - the result is fucked-up kids.

I am sick and tired of hearing how computer games, violence on TV, the Internet and modern gadgets are bad for kids. Of themselves, they are not bad, but when they are all used by selfish parents as pseudo-babysitters to keep the kids occupied whilst they work to fill their houses with expensive crap, and when the kids don't get attention and a counter-active balance of real live love and experience from their parents, that's when they get fucked up. How could it be otherwise if kids are spending most of their time in virtual (possibly violent) game worlds and the Internet?

People, and especially parents, need to get their priorities right. Extreme materialism and kids are probably mutually exclusive, they need to decide what's more important and stop being greedy "having your cake and eating it" people.

Just because you have the right to free speech does not eliminate the need to sometimes shut the fuck up for the sake of someone else's sensibilities or because that's what an intelligent and sentient being would be able to work out is the right thing to do in the circumstances.

Nothing annoys me more than people who do not accept personal responsibility - yes, you can do pretty much what you like in this world of ours but when you do it, be prepared to face the consequences.

It's actually more the case that Microsoft, deliberately or not, does not publish good enough documentation that explains the.doc,.xls,.ppt, etc. formats well enough to allow developers of other office packages to build in support for those formats with 100% compatibility.

An open standard becomes one because a number of working parties, that can happily include Microsoft, agree on that standard as being best for what needs to be achieved and can also be built into any software packages as necessary.

I've always found that putting a few pebbles in a metal dustbin, rolling it down some stone steps, record it then loop it back on itself for 40 minutes creates a very close approximation to the "Mastered as Puppets" or just about any Metallicock album.

Agreed. And I've never had a single occasion where I've done a Windows installation where I've not had to go off and download drivers from somewhere else to get all the hardware working.

That doesn't mean it's a problem because when you've done it, everything works fine and everyone is happy - but the Windows people seem to conveniently forget these things when they accuse Linux of being difficult to install.

In other words all those people using Starbucks' free wifi are broadcasting their Apple ID and password to everyone else in range.

I've never owned an Apple device in my life and have no intention of ever doing so - but wrong is wrong and I have to correct you.

The passwords are encrypted over SSL and therefore anyone snooping a connection will only see gobbledigook - in no way are they broadcast in clear text.

The actual vulnerability here is that someone can, using their own constructed SSL keys, perform a man-in-the-middle attack to step into the middle of a communication - at which point they could no doubt request the password and be sent it in what would be a decryptable and readable format.

So, yes, it's a vulnerability, but whereas anyone can run sniffer traces to read packets on the wire or in the air, a man-in-the-middle attack takes a considerably higher amount of technical expertise to carry out.